Yeah, so I got one of those Zip drives yesterday. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, ViaTexas got a Zip drive yesterday. I got the USB Powered Zip 250 model – the one that doesn’t even need to plug into the wall. It r0x0rs. Yeah, I know everyone got one of these things seven years ago when they were all the rage, but I’m slow. So I fire up this little baby and I’m fairly surprised by it’s performance – the instruction manual said that if possible you should not use other USB devices simultaneously. Well, my mouse is USB, so no go there – maybe if I don’t touch it. Well I fire up the Iomega Backup program, which I figured was just a frontend for copying stuff. I select a few directories, being sure to keep it under 250MB when I notice the preferences. I check them out and they tell me that it can compress the files. Well great but most of what I have is ZIP files, which are probably as compressed as they’re going to get, so I’m not too hopeful. I tell it to start and then I head to bed. As soon as I lay down I realize I need to do something so I go do that and then I check on the Zip drive – it’s transferring 36MB a minute – it’s going to be finished in no time. So I head to bed – and an hour later I get a phone call, a job in the nightly accounting feed blew up and I have to unfuck it. Only it’s so bad it extends beyond what I know to do, and beyond what my team mate knows how to do, so we call up the head guy and he says it’s so bad that he has to restore the nightly backup and we’ll have to attack it in the morning. Wow – lucky for me it wasn’t something I screwed up. Some kid had too many transactions for the program – it tops out at 650 and he had 666. Scary. So while I’m waiting on the head dude to get back to me on what this is going to entail I check the Zip disk. It’s only half full – it literally got the 2.1:1 compression it was stating. Also, it compresses the whole thing to a file, so not the blind copy I was expecting. On the one hand, this isn’t what I’m looking for – the idea behind this is the fact that I need something to update a database to a big removable disk. However, this backup dealie is nice, so I fire up a new backup of 357MB worth of stuff. This morning I check on it and it got down to like 140someoddMB. Cool. Me likey the Zip disk. Plus Iomega for some reason has started making its 250MB Zip disks in a “U” shape – presumably because it helps to avoid confusion with the 100MB disks.
Tonight I’m going to embark on some adventures with the DirectX SDK.